My gaming lately has certainly been Harperrific! My Wednesday group has started another one of Harper’s games, Agon. Agon is a game of mythological Greek heroes in the style of the Illiad or the Odyssey. I missed the first session where everyone made up characters and exchanged oaths, but it was relatively easy to make up a character for the game. Agon uses a die-step system, where your skills/abilities range from d4 to d12.

One of the places the game really uses the ancient Greek color is in the character names. The book has a big list of sample names, but each character also has a “heroic trait.” The heroic trait is a short phrase that describes your character, such as Strong Limbed, Honey Tongued, or Far Aiming. If you’ve ever read even an excerpt from the ancient Greek oral poems, these phrases are used to describe people over and over. For me, just this little touch brought a lot of setting flavor to the characters. The excellent thing about these heroic traits is that they also add mechanical benefits to your character. For example, my character, Strong Limbed Aias, son of Ares, gains a bonus to Might and Wrestle due to his heroic trait.

In play, I quite enjoyed it. I have a familiarity and appreciation of the source material, so I got into the role-play a lot. Part of the game is calling for conflicts, called agon in the game. Participating in agon is the only way to advance and succeed, and you are in competition with your fellow players as well. Everyone rolls to overcome the GM’s adversity while simultaneously trying to achieve the highest roll. Success gives you glory, but beating your peers gives you even more glory.

We did many non-combat struggles during our session and achieved 3 out of 4 of our quest objectives (finding out what these objectives are is part of the game). We didn’t get to a combat, so I will discuss how that works in the next post on this. Our characters, returning from the Trojan War, lost our fleet at sea, and the single ship we had was visited by Poseidon who gave us a quest to visit the island of Anaphe and sacrifice the tallest thing that walks on the island at the highest point of the island. Poseidon told us this would appease the gods and allow us to return home.

On the island, we quickly determined that we needed to speak to the king, King Tychogenes, and we hiked to his palace. His chief palace guard, Aristokles, turned out to be a giant of a man, and we considered briefly whether this man was meant to be the sacrifice. Luckily, it turned out that the tallest living thing on the island was the Great Red Swan, unfortunately a favorite of both the king and Apollo. We did manage to convince Tychogenes to allow us to hunt it without angering him, though he had doubts about our future success. The king’s daughter Lucoria came to us and told us a secret about the swan that will help us capture it for sacrifice, and that’s where we had to stop playing. Our next agon is likely to be the fight with the swan’s guardian, Cygnophylox.

One of our players seemed to have a bit of trouble and it would probably be good to check in with him before we play again to see if he wasn’t having fun and what me might be able to to do about it. He really had the worst luck possible, only succeeding in about two rolls over the course of the evening. Participating in every check is important, and the non-combat struggles we were performing were definitely not this player’s character’s strong suit. I think pure bad luck played a role as well. One of the other players also commented that they didn’t quite get the competitive aspect of the game at first, either. I think it will be interesting to see how everyone settles in as we play into multiple sessions.